What is the work?[]
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, or Higurashi: When They Cry, or alternatively as Higurashi: When the Cicadas Cry, is a series of visual novels by 07th Expansion, and the first of the When They Cry series alongside Umineko: When the Sea Gulls Cry. Higurashi can best be described as Groundhog Day but with murder, or maybe the OG Happy Death Day.
Initially, the series starts off with Keiichi Maebara who moves into a small village of two thousand people. Hinamizawa seems at first to be a quiet, peaceful village, Keiichi learns that every four years during the Watanagashi Festival that is dedicated to their god Oyashiro, one person is murdered and the other goes missing. The visual novels start off as kind of nonsensical with characters murdering each other and then coming back as if nothing happened. All of these deaths seem to revolve around the young Rika Furude who is the "Queen Carrier" of the village where it seemed that when she gets killed, Hinamizawa gets destroyed.
Sure enough, the answer arcs provide further explanations into the strange occurrences in Hinamizawa, such as the truth behind the Hinamizawa Syndrome and why the characters die all the time and then come back without much difficulty or memories of the previous events. And it all has to do with the mastermind, Nurse Miyo Takano.
Who is the candidate? What has he done?[]
Despite being the main antagonist of the series, Takano herself doesn't count for a plethora of reasons such as her having mitigating factors such as genuinely loving her grandfather and wanting his research into the Hinamizawa Syndrome to be realized, and also because she ended up getting infected by the syndrome herself. But namely, she doesn't count because her childhood was seriously fucked up.
So, she lost both of her parents in a bus accident, and to make matters worse, she attended an Orphanage. But surely the Orphanage seemed to actually be pretty good. I mean the Staff Leader consoles Miyo when she first came to his doorstep, so how can this be ba...Yeah, no. The first thing the Staff Leader does to Miyo when they were alone together? He slaps her in the face to stop her crying and then he drags her into the building with her hair. It only gets worse from there. He held the orphanage with an iron grip forcing children to do torturous things like forcing one boy to drink ink when he accidentally spilled it among other horrific punishments.
During her time at the orphanage, Miyo met a group of kids led by a girl named Eriko who was staging an escape. Miyo bonds with her, and joins the escape plan...but it all goes to shit as you'd imagine. Miyo is forced to clean out the outhouse with nothing but her tongue, but that was nothing compared to Eriko's punishment. She gets seeds placed on her body, and she was pecked to death by the chickens. Miyo even catches one of the chickens pecking out one of her eyes. Thank God that none of that was shown in the anime adaptation.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?[]
A HARD no on that. He is a sadistic, abusive asshole who doesn't receive ANY punishment for none of the shit that he pulled. That's right, he is an aggravating example of a karma houdini if I've ever seen one.
Heinous standard[]
He naturally can't compete with Takano who not only killed Rika in some of the previous timelines but also had the entirety of Hinamizawa gassed to death, but she herself can only do as much because she was being backed by the mysterious Nomura. But where I think the Staff Leader stands out is obviously running an orphanage where he systematically tortured and abused the children under his care -- including one act of manslaughter -- and the personal tie he has with Miyo. He is squarely the reason as to why she became the God-obsessed psychopath she is when she grew up.